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Painting Process: Robot At Window

Here's another in my work-in-progress posts where I discuss the process of creating one of my robot paintings. As with all of these pieces, this one was painted in Photoshop, 12"x18", 300dpi, in RGB.

This piece started with the very lovely Stephanie standing next to a set of patio doors which gave her a huge lighting contrast, something I definitely wanted to incorporate into the piece. I roughed out the basic idea for the setting, with a high-tech room facing over a cyberpunk cityscape.

Robot design over Stephanie drawn in. I'm keeping the internal lighting on Stephanie limited to just her eyes to allow the major lighting coming from outside the window.

Basic flat painting layers laid down. The various colours just stand in for the individual painting layers, and will have no relevance on the final colour scheme of the painting.

Background colour layers dropped in.

The painting done on the room's interior. I wanted to keep that very simple and flat to put focus on both Stephanie (and her high-contrast lighting) and the deep cityscape.

Cityscape painted. With the cityscape tinted green, and the interior painted in a cool colour scheme, I can already see that I need to go with a neutral to warm colour palette on Stephanie, with a cool light source from the window itself.

This one is a bit subtle but important. I've added a reflection of Stephanie onto the window, to make it look more like a glass surface rather than just a hole in the side of the building. I didn't add a lot of crazy lighting to the reflection because I wanted to keep it very subtle, but it does add a sense of realism.

Basic metal painting on Stephanie.

Lighting, colour, and polishing effects added in, including making the window itself a more obvious light source, with a neutral/warm light source to the left of frame to better round out the figure and the warm lighting from her eyes to make Stephanie jump out just that much more.

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Here's another in my progress posts, where I go over the basic steps I use to do one of my robot (and other) illustrations. Like all the other pieces in these posts, this was painted in Photoshop, 300dpi, in RGB, at 12"x18".

Starting with a photo I took of Selina, I worked out the idea of her as a winged robot, standing up high on scaffolding or something similar, over a city street inspired by Tokyo. I was thinking lots and lots of neon signage in the background, which worked as the photo was heavily in shadow, so there would be a lot of contrast between the background and foreground.

I laid out the basic robot pattern I wanted on her. Again, I knew that she would mostly be in shadow, so I included machinery that would give her a few internal light sources, especially from the lifting motors inside her wings, but not so many as to detract from the neon patterns behind her.

The next step was developing the buildings and signage in the background, as well as the very busy…

I was just looking at my blog, and realized that I haven't posted anything for several months. I need to rectify that right now.
Here's another in my series of procedural posts, detailing the overall process for doing one of my robot paintings. As with all the paintings in this series, these are painted in Photoshop, at 12"x18", 300dpi, in RGB.
I started with a basic illustration of the various characters, all based on my friend Marie. We had set up a shoot with this composition in mind.
The next step is designing the overall cityscape behind the characters, and creating the interior space of the nightclub they are in. The curving lines of the interior space serve to keep drawing the eye toward the characters, keeping them the main focus of the piece.
The overall robot design is laid out for all the characters. I am keeping the designs fairly consistent, making it obvious that they are all copies of the same robot model.

Well, on top of my regular commission work, the first month of 2017 managed to be very productive for me. I managed to get a series of new paintings done, all of which I really like, as well as starting to develop a new project that should end up being the centerpiece of my new book of painting. But more on that in the coming months.

All these, and plenty others, can be seen on my RedBubble Gallery, where they can be purchased as prints, clocks, t-shirts, and other products!